World's Fastest Network Launched to Connect TeraGrid Sites

PITTSBURGH, February 27, 2003 
Fiber optic links between Los Angeles and Chicago have been
"lit up" to form the cross-country network
backbone for the National Science Foundation's $88 million
TeraGrid project. Technicians are sending the first test
data packets racing across the network, which boasts an
unprecedented bandwidth  roughly 10 million times the speed
of a typical dial-up Internet connection and four times
faster than existing research networks.

At 40 gigabits per second, the new "backplane,"
developed in partnership with Qwest Communications, will
connect the resources of the TeraGrid, a multiyear effort to
build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, distributed
computing infrastructure for open scientific research.
Scientists will use the TeraGrid to make fundamental
discoveries in fields as varied as biomedicine, global
climate, and astrophysics. The first applications will begin
to use the TeraGrid capabilities from all sites this spring.

The backplane consists of four 10 Gb/s optical fiber
"lambdas" (light pipelines) running from a major
Internet hub in Los Angeles to the StarLight hub in Chicago
and three 10 Gb/s lambdas to each site. Juniper Networks
provided the routers-- the first in the nation available to
handle the combined 40 Gb/s fiber traffic.

"With our network operational, the scientific research
community will soon gain access to a rich set of computing
and data management resources and grid infrastructure that
will transform computational science and engineering,"
said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and chief architect of the
TeraGrid project. "This network backplane is optimized
for the communication requirements of the largest scientific
applications, and it will make possible the next generation
of scientific breakthroughs."

"Our TeraGrid network will enable remote access to
large-scale data collections, nationwide backups, and other
critical activities for data-oriented computing," said
Fran Berman, director of SDSC and chair of the TeraGrid
Executive Committee.

Argonne's Linda Winkler, TeraGrid network architect, led the
effort to design, select, and install the network. "A
key design criterion was that all the TeraGrid resources
appear to be part of a single facility," she said.
"The vendors were selected to help us stay at the
cutting edge. The design allows new sites to be connected to
the TeraGrid network in the future."

"This is an historic, major step forward for our
national cyberinfrastructure," said PSC scientific
directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint
statement. "This unprecedented bandwidth will
facilitate work on many important projects, from
biomedicine, storm forecasting, and climate change to
fundamental physics and chemistry."

Qwest Communications provided the fiber lambdas for the
TeraGrid network. "Qwest is delighted to reach this
milestone in the creation of the NSF TeraGrid," said
Wesley K. Kaplow, chief technology officer for Qwest's
Government Services Division. "This is the culmination
of three years of working with these research groups,
supporting their goals with financial, conference, and
network services."

Kaplow noted that Qwest was a founding supporter of the
Global Grid Forum, which unites grid researchers worldwide,
and that it has provided extensive network services for the
annual Supercomputing Conference as well as support for
other networking projects. "Qwest looks forward to this
continuing relationship and the development of network and
application technology that the TeraGrid will deliver,"
Kaplow said.